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The Project: Compaq Presario V2000

I got a new toy to play with: A Compaq Presario V2000 w/ AMD Mobile Sempron and ATI Radeon Xpress 2000M. It started out with 256mb of pc2700 RAM and I added an extra 512mb to bring it to a total of 768mb. The sound card appears to be an ATI (They made sound cards?!) IXP Rev 2 AC97. I know it has WLAN built in but I have yet to figure the make/model out.

Now here is the project/problem: What distro would work best with this hardware? I tried PCLOS07 (cause PCLOS09 won't download >_<) and got nothing but problems. I am running Kubuntu 8.10 right now and I am thoroughly unimpressed. KDE4 is nice, I just don't like how the user automatically gets root privileges. I also don't like Adept. Synaptic is so much easier to use.

Anyone have any suggestions on what distros would work best? Thanks for any suggestions and comments

If (k)ubuntu works fine, most of the other major distros ought to as well. Also, you can install synaptic on Kubuntu, if it isn't already installed, and you can set a real root password in Ubuntu and revoke your user's sudo privileges, if that's your main complaint. If you want a faster, more streamlined system, I always like to point people at Arch Linux. It is more of an intermediate users distro though, and requires some time to set up. Once you've set it up though, runs like a dream.

Thanks for the input. I just didnt like Kubuntu overall. Never did but I had a few liveCD's lying around and decided to throw it on as a temp fix

I finaly got PCLOS09 downloaded and installed. Runs like a dream, everything is working with nearly 0 configuration.

So the project wasnt realy a project after all. I thought it would take a while to get the wireless working and getting all the laptop drivers. (shurg)

Apologies in advance if this is considered a "necropost", but I wanted to add that I am *still* using my V2000 with SimplyMEPIS 8.0. Had to ndiswrapper the Broadcom 43xx wifi, back then, but thankfully had the driver from the original XP install on tap.

PCLOS was another I tried, but they have since disappointed me majorly by dropping ALL repo support for PCLOS09 (because they were the same repos as PCLOS07 and they were intending to drop that...)

I'm leery of trying to run anything with KDE4 on the V2000, seems to start bogging down a bit. PureOS looks promising, though, if I go that way.

Still holding out some hope that someone will fork KDE3.5, or that LDXE or XFCE will catch up to where KDE3.5 was, without going into the excesses of KDE4.